When we woke up this morning conditions looked epic. The trees and flags were still. The water was as flat as you can reasonably expect the ocean to get. We were worried if we let our excitement show that we might jinx it. Both dive spots this morning were on Molasses Reef, which is a fairly shallow reef, so I hoped the calm water and shallow depths would lead to some good pictures. When we arrived at Spanish Anchor, it wasn’t as clear as I thought it would be, but it was as calm as anywhere I’ve been diving.

I went down to 14 pounds today. I thought I should be at 12, but I wasn’t confident enough to pull the trigger on that. But 14 proved to be more than I needed. It was easy to compensate for a little extra weight, but there was no way to compensate for losing my tank. You read that right. As soon as I jumped off the boat I felt my tank slip out of my BCD. I grabbed it and prevented it from actually dropping to the bottom, but I obviously couldn’t continue the dive without fixing it. I got Charmaine’s attention and she got Alison (our dive master) to help out. I offered to go back to the boat, but she was able to put the tank back in right in the water. Apparently fixing your own tank is one of the new skills PADI requires you to be able to do to get certified now. It makes sense. I think I could have done it by slipping out of my BCD, etc. But it was so much easier to have someone else do it for me.

I put the camera in full manual mode today. It took some time getting used to all the different switches and levers and knobs that needed to be adjusted to get the flash to fire. Sometimes I completely missed the shot because I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong, but other times I got some really good shots. We got up close and personal with 2 different nurse sharks and I got some decent shots of each of them. We also saw some big lobsters, angelfish, filefish, butterflyfish, parrotfish, blue tangs, grunts, and even a trumpetfish and a trunkfish. There were soft corals everywhere and some interesting colors on the brain coral, fire coral, and elkhorn coral. Near the end of the dive I found a few kinds of coral that had grown into a formation I called a coral wreath. It was really quite spectacular to see.

From there we had a short surface interval while we idled up to the North Star dive spot at the top of Molasses Reef. I think the visibility was actually improving. It’s too bad we were not able to dive again in the afternoon. I have to work, but I guess I should be happy that I have the flexibility to go on trips like this in the first place.

At North Star we jumped right in and started seeing lobster, barracuda, squirrelfish, hogfish, parrotfish, and, of course, grunts. At one point we spotted a scorpionfish hiding in plain sight. There were lots of other fish similar to past dives and I found myself paying more attention to the coral. I started looking for things like flamingo tongues and seahorses. I didn’t actually find any, but it was interesting looking at the smaller details. What a great day of diving!